Post-Quake Redesign Will Delay Olive View Hospital Plan

Construction of a much-needed emergency room and perinatal facility at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center will be delayed at least four months while engineers scramble to improve the design of the steel frame building after the high failure rate of similar structures in the Northridge earthquake.

Tearing up the old blueprint and redesigning the proposed four-story building will cost at least $2 million extra, officials said. The county plans to apply to the Federal Emergency Management Administration for reimbursement.

For thousands of Olive View patients, the delay also means enduring overcrowded conditions even longer. The earliest the project could now be completed would be mid-1998.

“We really need the space in the new building,” said Caroline Rhee, the county hospital’s chief operating officer, pointing out that the hospital delivers twice as many babies annually--6,201--as the existing obstetrics unit was designed to handle.

The redesign of the $54-million building could end up saving lives, said Larry Colvin, director of the county Department of Health Services’ facilities implementation team. Colvin said several other proposed buildings in the county’s $2.3-billion health facilities replacement and improvement plan may also have to be redesigned.

“In reality, we could go ahead and build using our current designs because the plans were approved before the Northridge quake,” Colvin said. “But it’d be the wrong thing to do. It’s important to build the safest structures possible to avoid the potential of a collapse.”

Steel frame buildings, designed to bend without breaking, were long considered among the safest to ride out an earthquake.

None of these modern office buildings, hospitals and other steel frame structures collapsed in the Jan. 17 quake. But cracks have been discovered in the welded connections of at least 130 buildings, more than a quarter of all steel frame buildings in quake-affected areas in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside.

In August, the California Seismic Safety Commission took the unprecedented step of urging building officials throughout the western United States to suspend a construction code and require proof that new mid- to high-rise steel frame buildings can withstand major earthquakes.

Developers and engineers now have to substantiate building designs submitted to Los Angeles County on a case-by-case basis by proving additional calculations, testing, improvements in design, inspection and construction practices.

A consortium of scientists, structural engineers and others in the steel industry have embarked on a government-funded research project to come up with new construction guidelines.

“About a year from now, we’ll be able to restore confidence in how to design steel frame buildings,” said Paul Fratessa, a structural engineer and chairman of the Seismic Safety Commission.

The county plans to have its new design tested by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, who will build a model of the structure and subject it to a simulated earthquake.

The free-standing building will increase Olive View’s capacity by about 50% when it is built on vacant land just north of the existing hospital. The new emergency room will contain 40 treatment areas, more than four times as many as the hospital has now, Rhee said. The new perinatal unit will be able to handle 8,000 births.